Installation guide

5. mxODBC Overview

You also can access the MS ODBC online reference from the Microsoft MDAC

web-site.

Please note that not all ODBC drivers and databases support the complete set of

available introspection parameters. When using them, please make sure that the

databases supported by your application do implement the parameters used in

your application.

5.3 Supported ODBC Versions

mxODBC can be configured to use ODBC 2.x or 3.x interfaces by setting the

ODBCVER symbol in mxODBC.h to the needed value. It uses the value provided by

the ODBC driver header files per default which usually is the latest ODBC

standard version available.

Most ODBC drivers today support ODBC 3.x and thus mxODBC will try to use

APIs from this version if available.

5.3.1 ODBC Managers

All supported ODBC managers (MS ODBC Manager, iODBC, unixODBC and

DataDirect) provide the ODBC 3.x interfaces and map these to ODBC 2.x

interfaces in case the driver for the database does not comply to ODBC 3.x.

However, some drivers only pretend to be ODBC 3.x compliant and raise

"Driver not capable" exceptions when using certain ODBC 3.x APIs or

features. If you run into such an situation, please contact support

for help. The

only way to solve this problem currently lies in adding workarounds which are

specific to a database.

To find out which ODBC version is being supported by the ODBC driver, you can

use

connection.getinfo(SQL.DRIVER_ODBC_VER)[1]. This will return a string

giving you the ODBC version number, e.g.

'03.51.00'.

5.3.2 Changes between ODBC 2.x and 3.x

Please also note that there are some changes in behavior between ODBC 2.x and

3.x compatible drivers/managers which means that certain option settings differ

slightly between the two versions and that special cases are treated differently for

ODBC 3.x than for ODBC 2.x. See the ODBC Documentation

for details.